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: /____\ : >> Miklos Rozsa: Ben-Hur - The Essential Film Music <<
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:..:... Supplier: SER 2003 Release Date: 11/01/2003 ...:..:
: : Ripper: SER 2003 Street Date: 00/00/2000 :..:...
...:..: Genre: Soundtrack Label: Silva Screen Records : :
: : Tracks: 23 Tracks Quality: 192kbps/HQ/44,1kHz ...:..:
: : Year: 2000 Channels: Joint Stereo : :
:..:... Source: CD Size: 142 MB :..:...
: : Language: English Rating: 77% of 100% : :
: : Grabber: EAC v0.95 Prebeta 3 Encoder: LAME v3.90.3 : :
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A Hungarian-born composer, most famous for his Hollywood and British
film scores, but also responsible for a significant body of chamber
pieces, concertos, and orchestral music for the concert hall. Rozsa's
music is steeped in post-romanticism, with stylistic roots in the folk
music of his native Hungary and some slight influences from those two
giants of 20th-century Hungarian music, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly.
Born in Budapest to a wealthy industrialist and landowner, Miklos
Rozsa spent his boyhood summers on his father's country estate, where
he first encountered the peasantry of the surrounding villages, and
began absorbing all he could of their music. He began playing the
violin at age five, and later studied the viola and the piano, and
made his public performing debut at age seven. Rozsa became an
important member of the Franz Liszt Society while in high school, but
was branded a rebel by school administrators for a pair of speeches
that he made defending the work of Bartok and Kodaly, who were
regarded as extremely controversial modernists.
In 1925, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a chemistry
major, to satisfy his father's wishes, but he switched to music after
his first year. His teachers included Herman Grabner and Karl Straube,
the cantor of Thomaskirche. During his undergraduate years, Rozsa
wrote his first formal composition, the Trio-Serenade for Strings, and
followed this with the Piano Quintet in F Minor, the Rhapsody for
Cello and Orchestra, and his Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song.
The Piano Quintet so impressed Straube that he brought it to the
attention of the major publishing house Breitkopf & Hartel, which
agreed to publish it and the Trio-Serenade. Following his graduation
in 1929, Rozsa worked as an assistant to Grabner in Leipzig, before
moving to Paris in 1931. His Serenade received a performance in
Budapest under Ernest von Dohnanyi, where it was heard by Richard
Strauss, who strongly encouraged the young composer to continue
writing music. His major breakthrough took place in 1934, with the
premiere of his Theme, Variations and Finale, which was quickly taken
up into the repertories of such renowned conductors as Charles Munch,
Karl Bohm, and Carl Schuricht, and, later, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno
Walter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Rozsa discovered movie music in the mid-'30s, when he learned that his
friend, composer Arthur Honneger, had written the score for a film.
Impressed with the results, Rozsa began to study movies more closely
for the role that music played in them. In 1937, he was invited to
write the score for the romantic espionage thriller Knight Without
Armour, starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat, which became an
international hit. Soon after, Rozsa was asked to join the staff of
its production company, London Films -- founded by his fellow
Hungarian expatriate Alexander Korda -- and during the next three
years, he scored such classic movies as The Four Feathers and The
Thief of Baghdad. When producer Alexander Korda was forced to move the
latter film's production from London to Hollywood in 1940, Rozsa was
among the London Films staff members who made the journey.
Having reached the filmmaking capital of the world, Rozsa made his way
as a freelance composer for several years, primarily in the employ of
Paramount Pictures in the films of Billy Wilder (Five Graves to Cairo,
Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend), producer David O. Selznick for
Alfred Hitchcock (Spellbound), and the occasional Korda production
(That Hamilton Woman, The Jungle Book). Following his winning of
Oscars for Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1948), Rozsa joined
the staff of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked for the next 15
years, doing the music for such classic films as Ben-Hur, for which he
won his third Oscar. During this period, he did not forsake his
concert music, writing such pieces as his Lullaby and Madrigal for
Spring, the solo piano piece Kaleidoscope, the motet To Everything
There Is a Season, and his First String Quartet. Rozsa's contract with
the studio gave him his summers free to compose, and complete autonomy
from the studio in his concert music activities.
In 1953, the famed violinist Jascha Heifetz, having seen some of
Rozsa's sketches for a proposed violin concerto, commissioned the
piece from Rozsa -- it was premiered in 1956 and recorded the same
year on RCA. The Violin Concerto proved an enduringly popular work,
and its success led to the 1961 joint commission from Heifetz and his
equally famous colleague, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, for a piece
utilizing violin and cello, the Sinfonia Concertante. The 1960s saw
Rozsa compose such large-scale orchestral pieces as the Notturno
Ungherese, a Piano Concerto for the virtuoso Leonard Pennario, and a
Cello Concerto written for Janos Starker. His 1970s output saw Rozsa
turn toward such solo works as the Valse Crepusculaire for piano,
although he also completed a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zuckerman,
which was premiered in 1984.
Rozsa was the most successful of his generation of film composers at
balancing his movie and concert work. Unlike Erich Wolfgang Korngold,
his concert music didn't suffer from his stay in Hollywood, and, in
contrast to Bernard Herrmann, Rozsa always had a well-defined and
recognizable "voice" as a serious composer. Occasionally, he would
even mix the two careers -- Rozsa wrote the score for his old friend
Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and also
can be seen in the film, conducting his own Violin Concerto. He
remained active as a composer in the mid-'80s, earning another Oscar
nomination for his score for Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time (1979),
and continued publishing new works into the end of the decade.
Despite the onset of advancing age and a debilitating stroke, which
combined to end his career in the concert hall, Rozsa retained an
active interest in all of his music into the 1990s. He assisted in the
recordings of new versions of his orchestral works by conductor James
Sedares on the Koch International label in the 1990s, and even
resurrected such works as the Symphony in Three Movements, which he
withdrew from publication in 1930. More post-romantic than modernist,
Rozsa's music is tonal and melodic, often achingly so, and his work at
its most accessible -- which is nearly all of it -- recalls the music
of Dvorak, Janacek, and Respighi, although it is drawn from Hungarian
sources, rather than Czech or Italian roots. And despite his post
-romantic and nationalistic leanings, Rozsa's work was also
characterized by an almost classical-era restraint, economy, and
discipline, which makes it eminently more listenable than the serious
work of most of his Hollywood contemporaries (Bernard Herrmann comes
to mind), who seldom understood the notion of restraint. His work
could bring recollections of pre-World War I Budapest alive; lift the
rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of Hungarian folk music to symphonic
heights; or, on the screen, express the myriad emotions behind human
behavior, from cold-blooded murder in The Killers to the teachings of
Jesus in Ben-Hur.
http://www.comcen.com.au/~agfam/miklos/
Tracks:
CD #1
01. Ben Hur Suite-Prelude (3:42)
02. Ben Hur Suite-Love Theme (2:58)
03. Ben Hur Suite-Parade Of The Charioteers (3:40)
04. Providence-Valse Crespesculaire - Finale (6:10)
05. Julius Caesar-Caesar Now Be Still - Finale (6:29)
06. El Cid-Overture (3:32)
07. El Cid-Love Theme (4:16)
08. Sodom And Gomhorrah-Overture (5:04)
09. Beau Brummell-Prelude - The King's Visit & Farewell (6:48)
10. Spellbound-Concerto For Orchestra (9:34)
CD #2
01. The Thief Of Bagdad Suite-Main Title (2:20)
02. The Thief Of Bagdad Suite-The Love Of A Princess (4:49)
03. The Thief Of Bagdad Suite-Flying Horse Galop (1:37)
04. The Thief Of Bagdad Suite-The Market At Basra (3:03)
05. King Of Kings-Prelude (2:50)
06. King Of Kings-The Lord's Prayer (2:45)
07. All The Brothers Were Valiant-Main Title - Finale (5:09)
08. Madame Bovary-Waltz (4:48)
09. The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad-Prelude - Sinbad Battles Kali - Finale (4:54)
10. Quo Vadis Suite-Prelude (2:21)
11. Quo Vadis Suite-Arabesque (5:22)
12. Quo Vadis Suite-Romanza (6:37)
13. Quo Vadis Suite-Ave Caesar (4:52)
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